13 Comments:

Good. The more, the merrier. I take this as a sign that constructive confrontation at Intel is dead and buried. Still, if that's what it takes to bring it back, so be it.

Btw, speaking of IT... CMMI now needs used for ALL IT projects in the future? Really? I thought one of the points of this efficiency effort was to reduce bureaucracy. I guess some stones did remain unturned after all.

You're CMMI comment is right on. Where's the empowerment of teams? Why can't teams own decision making instead of centralized bodies? If this is efficiency then I'm the heavyweight boxing champ. All we have is the same people making the same decisions. Another of my favorites is we're moving managers to individual contributors but won't redeploy them. If I get caught in that, I sure hope I like the new manager and job!

I agree with the CMMi comments. Requiring it for everything shows a misunderstanding of the purpose and intent of CMMi, and a lack of willingness to embrace alternative approaches, like Agile Development, to get some projects done more quickly and with less bureaucracy.

CMMI is something dreamt up by Carnegie Mellon professors as a continual consulting revenue stream.

The basic idea is that there are certain key practices which are common and essential for repeatable predictable execution.

The more of these practices you incorporate into your daily work, the higher "level" you are.

So far, so good. But it is in the implementation that things go awry. Some don't read carefully enough and assume that if some is good then more is better. Some find the implementation and auditing to be a profession itself and as such are parasitic to some extent, over-burdening teams which are all ready stretched thin with bureaucratic processes. Some are just dumb and work to the letter of the law rather than the spirit.

It finds a ready home at organizations which are highly process oriented (read Intel) but I'm hardly convinced that it is as useful and effective as claimed.

Do you think that Intel will use this as an opportunity to weed out those employees that are very close to retirement and move up employees who make far less? Or is this just another attempt to look like they are doing something other than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?

To me, it seems that CMMI was sold as a panacea to IT management by people who are very successful salesmen. These people are experts in making things look good on Powerpoint slides. Imagine what wonderful things could be accomplished if these people actually worked on what's best for Intel instead of coming up with the next Big Deal for focal time, but we all know that's not how Intel works these days.

Our group was told that CMMI was here to stay, and if we didn't like it, we could go look for another job somewhere else. The sound you hear is the open door policy being slammed shut.

Saying that CMMI was a mistake would mean that the Intel site that started it all (just a plain old manufacturing site before) would fade back into obscurity. Their managers have shot through the ranks because of it, and we can't have that, of course. They need to protect their fiefdoms, and go on to the next new thing with a pointless management switcharoo. The rest of us sit here, paying the huge overhead for it and stuck in this bureaucratic morass. It sure is a good time to be an auditor.

This CMMI thing sounds a lot like the idiotic "Theory of Constraints" scheduling approach that was MANDATED across ICG when Sean Baloney was "running" the show. TOC (with all of its expensive software and time involved) did absolutely nothing to keep programs on track. Viewing the "Critical chain" by management always only showed the one (usually wrong) thing that was "behind" in the schedule and left the rest of the "elephants in the living room" to slip, and slip, and slip ...

I will say this though, if you are an idiot manager it provided a wonderful interface so that you could pad your focal accomplishments. There was a nice method for making "monkey charts" to show YOUR boss. As long as you kept your area in the "green" (versus "yellow" or "red") then it meant smooth sailing and you were doing a wonderful job managing your portion of the project. Too bad things were easy to fake and being "in the green" meant absolutely nothing.

I'm not a fan of Microsoft in any way, but good ol' MS Project goes a long way to actually showing critical paths in projects if the schedule itself is properly constructed and constrained. Yet, we go off and spend untold amounts of money mandating something Mr. Baloney and his staff were sold on by some other fool "salesman."

Intel is broken and will continue to be broken. PSO's announcements and all the Marketing/IT/HR fallout will do nothing to fix what is broken around here ....

The current actions should quite honestly be Paul & cronies last stand. Most mega-corp's in the state of Intel today would have brought in a big name CEO before now, and they would have typically cleaned house. The Intel top brass know that. What they fail to recognize is that the company got to where it is today because of strategic blunders created by the very people who are now pointing at tactical improvements as the panacea. How many failed business ventures does it take to prove the execs have gotten out of their depth.

There are rumors about musical chairs that senior managers are playing at IT India. The rumor is that all the big shots are playing safe by changing chairs they hold. I don't understand why India need very senior managers for admin work!! Despite the uncertainity, no senior manager left IT india although there was a major churnout in ICs and the top management clearly indicated that the cuts mainly targeted to managers. Probably they have the luxuary of NOWORK-FAT PAY-Leisure life style, where else they can get that!!!!